Opinion: The Unintended Result of the Bongbong Marcos Presidency

To a generation of Filipinos who never lived through it, the name Ferdinand Marcos Sr. is still shorthand for dictatorship and plunder. Ask most young Filipinos who he was, and the answer comes back some version of "the most corrupt president we ever had" — a reputation backed by the Philippine government’s own Presidential Commission on Good Government, which has estimated the Marcos family’s ill-gotten wealth from the martial law era at somewhere between $5 billion and $10 billion.

For decades after the family’s 1986 ouster, Imelda Marcos and her children worked to rehabilitate that legacy, largely without success. What changed was not the historical record but the political landscape: social media, coordinated messaging, and a new generation with no living memory of martial law reopened a door that direct persuasion never could. In 2022, a Marcos returned to Malacañang — this time the son, carrying his father’s name into the presidency his father once used to entrench a dictatorship.

It was, on paper, a chance to write a different story: a Marcos elected by the very public his father had wronged, with every incentive to distance the family name from corruption for good. Instead, his presidency has coincided with what may be the largest public-corruption scandal in the country’s post-EDSA history — the flood control scandal this site has covered for weeks, with an Ombudsman-alleged ₱56 billion in ill-gotten wealth tied to a former House Speaker and his allies, ₱545 billion in flood-control spending under scrutiny, and a sitting senator’s own plunder case still working through the courts.

None of the specific plunder charges filed so far name President Marcos himself, and this piece isn’t claiming otherwise. But critics of the administration argue that the sheer scale of what has surfaced on his watch — not a single scandal but a system-wide one, spanning Congress, a government department, and multiple administrations’ worth of contracts — rivals, in their view, the scale of plunder his father’s name became synonymous with. Whether that comparison holds up to scrutiny is a legitimate argument to have. What isn’t in dispute is the irony: a presidency that had the singular opportunity to close the book on "Marcos" and corruption in the same sentence has instead kept the two words next to each other in the news, week after week.